Giving Your Personal AI a Home and a Body

Two questions every personal AI builder must answer

• Where will it live? (its home)

  They could live in a native iOS app like Tolans, on iMessage or WhatsApp or Telegram, on a website, or even in some kind of audio-only pendant.

• What will it be able to do? (its arms and legs)

  A basic personal AI is a chatbot that can answer Q&A questions. This is what the early days of ChatGPT looked like. You can add all kinds of agentic capabilities. Searching the web is the first one people think of. Maintaining a structured user profile is another. You can do a lot more: making reservations on Resy, managing a Partiful, curating a weekly grocery delivery order, ordering movie tickets off your favorite indie movie theatre website, calling up an art gallery to see if they do walk-ins, etc.

Home base for your personal AI

We discuss extending the agentic capability layer for personal AIs elsewhere. In this post, I want to focus on where personal AIs should live.

Consumers will want a home base for their personal AIs. We will want to take our personal AIs with us across the internet. In some ways, we already do this. Our parasocial relationships with creators already span modalities. I might watch a TV show on Netflix, listen to a podcast about the lead actor on Spotify, and then watch some TikToks criticizing its politics.

Consumers are heterogeneous yet mimetic. I'm not suggesting that every person or friend group will want a different home base. Rather, there will be a wide array of different home bases, as varied as there are microcosms of culture on TikTok.

Let's assume that existing surfaces (iMessage, Instagram, etc.) will survive for a long time. The reason for this is pure laziness. They are already built and scaled, with network effects and consumer habits. Even though network effects will be eroded away by consumer agents infiltrating these platforms, it won't happen all at once. And consumer habits can take generations to change.

Nevertheless, there will be opportunities to create new home bases for consumers to interact with personal AIs. As personal AIs become more capable, and the integration layer of the internet matures, the environments we use to interact with personal AIs will diversify. Some will use an existing surface like iMessage, Snapchat, or Slack. Some will want something cute and embodied. Highly agentic productivity hackers will probably create elaborate dashboards. Some will live in VR or digital worlds. Others will want a forum, or maybe a voice-only experience.

Just as the personal AI market will fracture into millions of personal AIs, so will the places we interact with them.